Critics of Qatari funding of American universities are watching Northwestern University’s incoming president to see how he handles the school’s upcoming contract renewal for its satellite campus in Doha, Qatar’s capital.

Northwestern’s contract to operate its campus in Qatar (NU-Q) is set to expire at the end of the 2027–2028 academic year. In an interview published May 11 with The Daily Northwestern, the university’s student newspaper, interim President Henry Bienen said the NU-Q review process is “ongoing” and would be left up to the university’s new leadership. 

“So I was planning to be in Doha for commencement, and a set of events made it hard for me to do it,” said Bienen, referring to the U.S.’ war with Iran. Bienen served as Northwestern president from 1995-2009 and assumed the role of interim university president in September. He established Northwestern’s Qatar campus in 2008, which has faced scrutiny for faculty ties to Hamas. 

“The provost-elect is there now. … [we] are talking about Qatar a lot, and I think it’s fair to say Qatar is very eager that we renew the relationship. So that’s a process of discussion back and forth. And that process is ongoing,” said Bienen. The Doha campus is currently remote, as a security precaution following Iranian missile strikes on the Gulf country.  

“Of course, Qatar is a board decision,” continued Bienen. “I have my ideas. I’m positive about the relationship, frankly. I do think at the end of the day, it’s a board issue, and a new president has to sign off on this one. But the conversations are going on. But the wild card is obvious in this fraught area. … There’s just a lot of variables, and nobody can predict with any certainty what the next month will bring, much less the next year.”  

On Monday, Northwestern announced the appointment of Mung Chiang as the school’s new president. Members of the Jewish community expressed optimism that Chiang — who assumes the role on July 1 — will leverage the supportive environment he fostered for Jewish students at Purdue University to help combat the antisemitism seen at Northwestern in recent years. 

However, questions remain regarding how Chiang will address NU-Q and shape the long-term trajectories of both the Doha and Evanston, Ill., campuses.

The Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern, a group of Northwestern students, faculty, parents and alumni, said in a statement to Jewish Insider that it is “hopeful that President-elect Chiang can help lead a serious, transparent, and institutionally credible review of Northwestern University’s relationship with Northwestern University in Qatar” amid “the increasing federal, congressional, donor and public scrutiny surrounding NU-Q.”  

CAAN asserted that Bienen “is materially conflicted with respect to any decision-making process concerning NU-Q and therefore should not serve as the principal decision-maker regarding the future of the Qatar campus. Publicly available disclosures show that Dr. Bienen has served on the advisory board of the Qatar Foundation, the entity that funds and oversees NU-Q.” 

Among CAAN’s concerns include “that NU-Q is deeply integrated with Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism and communications programs.”

“Northwestern has used Qatar Foundation funding to support journalism and communications education through NU-Q, while congressional investigators and outside watchdogs have increasingly questioned whether partnerships involving Al Jazeera and Qatar-backed media ecosystems create risks relating to editorial independence, ideological influence, and institutional neutrality,” CAAN said. 

Northwestern has received approximately $737 million from the Qatari government in connection with NU-Q operations, including annual payments reportedly totaling approximately $70 million per year to sustain the campus, according to CAAN.  

Brandy Shufutinsky, director of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Program on Education and National Security, pointed to Georgetown University’s Bridge Initiative, a multiyear research project on Islamophobia, which reportedly requires Qatari approval for speakers and programming. 

“I’m wondering if Northwestern’s campus in Doha — and even their main campus — [would] have a similar type program where they’re basically handing over final say to the [Qatari] government,” Shufutinsky told JI. 

Last year, the House Committee on Education and Workforce released transcripts of an interview with former Northwestern President Michael Schill on the school’s relationship with Qatar. Committee staff noted during the interview that a section of Northwestern’s agreement with the Qatar Foundation, which funds Northwestern’s satellite campus, legally binds staff and students to follow the country’s laws and “social customs.”

“NU, NU-Q, and their respective employees, students, faculty, families, contractors and agents, shall be subject to the applicable laws and regulations of the State of Qatar, and shall respect the cultural, religious and social customs of the State of Qatar,” the agreement reads. 

Shufutinsky said she would like to see Chiang address “what does that mean related to gender segregation and women’s rights, considering Qatar is the last Gulf nation to require unmarried women [under age 25] to have a male companion or get male approval if they want to travel.”   

“Those values are counter to American social values, customs and norms,” said Shufutinsky. “What does that mean for the girls and women who are studying and teaching on that campus?” 

Northwestern did not respond to a request for comment from JI asking if Chiang has indicated his plans for NU-Q.  

The questions around contract renewal come as the Iran war is damaging Qatar’s once booming economy, particularly in the oil and gas sector. The country, one of the world’s wealthiest nations, could need to reevaluate foreign partnerships to cut spending. 

A report released Tuesday shows dozens of established American universities are also nearing financial trouble. 

That leads to a bigger question, said Shufutinsky. “Are these universities becoming so dependent on foreign dollars that they are unable to function, and does that mean they’re going to be willing to turn a blind eye to things like human rights abuses?”  

Over the last two years, the second semester of the academic year at American universities coincided with crisis and chaos. 

In 2024, it was anti-Israel encampments overtaking campus quads across the country; last year, it was threats from the Trump administration to slash hundreds of millions of dollars in funding and ban foreign students. 

By comparison, the spring of 2026 has been relatively smooth sailing for research universities, even with a bit of hubbub over graduation speakers scrutinized for their stance on Israel and Gaza at a few schools, including the University of Michigan and Georgetown Law. 

But it’s not that things have gone back to the pre-Oct. 7, pre-Donald Trump normal. University administrators have just gotten better at managing an ambient sense of friction: Conflict between university leaders and activist faculty and students is still bubbling under the surface, and the threat of funding cuts at the federal level lingers. 

According to several university presidents who gathered last week at the Milken Institute Global Conference in Los Angeles, the task before universities is to win back the trust of skeptical Americans. 

“The world of higher education, I think, is still in turmoil,” Vanderbilt University Chancellor Daniel Diermeier told Jewish Insider in an interview at the Milken confab. “I think the time when a university does say that’s all overblown and everything is great, that’s over. At least the vast majority of university presidents know that there are challenges, and they want to take them on.” 

While the leaders of many elite universities struggled to respond to anti-Israel activism that at times veered into antisemitism and violence, Diermeier was one of a handful of leaders at elite universities in 2023 to speak clearly about what constituted acceptable protest and what violated school rules. He has also been a forceful advocate for institutional neutrality, a position that many of Vanderbilt’s peer institutions — such as Harvard, Stanford and Columbia — have since adopted in the wake of that heady year. 

“My sense is that higher education is moving overall,” said Diermeier. “You feel there is momentum there. … It’s gratifying to see that this is happening, and it must happen, because fundamentally we need to regain the trust of the American public.” 

For American Jews, the post-Oct. 7 campus chaos has led some to rethink the kind of institution they want to attend.

“As a professor, as an educator, one of the most tragic dimensions of what’s happened on campus is it’s introduced this wedge between American Jews and the university,” Steven Weitzman, director of the Center of Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, said at a panel on antisemitism at Milken. “That relationship has been so important for Jewish success and also for the success of the university.” 

That wedge has benefitted schools like Vanderbilt and Dartmouth College, each of which have pitched themselves as places where a multiplicity of voices can be found, without the disruptions that have plagued peer institutions. 

“We have a culture that is very committed to creating an educational environment where these different voices can be heard, and where you don’t have to justify all the time that you went on a Birthright trip,” said Diermeier.

Dartmouth College President Sian Beilock started at the university in September 2023, and she said she has observed “a more robust, vibrant Jewish presence on our campus” since then. “It feels like something special is happening,” she told JI in an interview at Milken. 

Both Beilock and Diermeier touted their cooperation with the campus Chabad and Hillel organizations. Earlier this month, the student government at The New School in New York City voted to defund and sever ties with Hillel over its connections to Israel. (The administration rejected the measure.) Beilock called the development “concerning,” and Diermeier said it is “awful.”

“It would never be tolerated for any other group. It is exactly what’s wrong. At that point, you are violating the fundamental principles of an institution,” Diermeier said. “They are terrible developments and it shows us that we still have a lot of work to do.”

Like Vanderbilt, Dartmouth took on the tumult of the post-Oct. 7 era forcefully and directly. Beilock said she was always clear about the university’s mission in a way that some of her colleagues at other schools were not, though that is beginning to change.

“We’ve called balls and strikes, and I actually think it’s led to a campus where we have some of the most diverse views portrayed on campus in a way that’s more respectful,” Beilock said. “I see a shift in presidents understanding that it’s important to call out the mission of an institution, to be clear about that, and important to ensure that people who are both receiving our education and benefiting from the impact, whether it’s our doctors or discoveries, see the power in what we do.”

In other words: universities need to do a much better job of telling their stories, and not acting like their worth is self-evident. Trust in higher education was higher last year than in 2023 or 2024 — 42%, according to a Gallup poll in 2025, up from 36% — but still down from 57% a decade before. University of Southern California President Beong-Soo Kim said at a Milken panel about the future of higher education that the problems facing the academy connect to a broader loss of public trust.

“There’s a larger breakdown in trust in other institutions, not just higher education, and I think that that’s something important to understand,” Kim said. “I think that there’s an opportunity for partnership among universities, between universities and the government, and the private sector.” 

Making change on that front requires humility, a quality that is not always present among elite institutions. 

“I think there’s a lot of institutional rigidity to prevent that from happening,” said Eric Gertler, CEO of U.S. News & World Report, which publishes annual college rankings.

Rebuilding that trust runs through Washington, university leaders have begun to realize. Prominent universities are building out satellite campuses — and lobbying shops — in the nation’s capital. 

Diermeier and Beilock told JI that they have each decided to engage with Washington more than ever, including by traveling to the city regularly for meetings with members of Congress and administration officials. Vanderbilt and Dartmouth have for now managed to avoid the most severe of the civil rights investigations or funding cuts coming from the Trump administration, but shifts in funding priorities from the federal government still impact the schools. 

“I spent a lot of time in D.C. in the last year. I’ve probably been there close to a dozen times, and I plan to continue it. It’s more than I did before, but really important,” Beilock said. “I think we have to be clear to our representatives what the value of the government-university partnership is and how important it is not to lose it. And part of that, to me, is being clear where we can do better.”

Qatar is the top country donating foreign funds to American universities, and Cornell University is its leading recipient, according to a new dashboard from the Department of Education that displays foreign gifts and contracts provided to U.S. educational institutions.

According to the database, $2.3 billion out of the $3 billion Cornell has received in foreign funding came from Qatar, which is a key financial supporter of Hamas. Qatar has provided $6.6 billion to universities overall, significantly more than the next leading countries, bolstering criticisms of the Gulf state’s potential influence over American higher education.

In a March interview with Jewish Insider, Cornell President Michael Kotlikoff defended the university’s decision to take funds from Qatar, saying that the “narrative that somehow Qatari funding coming to the university affects the university’s decisions or faculty courses could not be further from the truth.”      

“Virtually almost all of the money that the Qatar Foundation has listed as going to Cornell is spent in Doha on education in the medical school that Cornell helps Qataris manage,” Kotlikoff told JI. 

According to the new dashboard, American universities have received more than $60 billion in foreign gifts and contracts over the span of several decades. Schools are required to report foreign gifts and contracts totaling over $250,000 in a year to the Department of Education as laid out in the Higher Education Act of 1965. 

Following Qatar, the top countries funding U.S. schools include Germany, England, China, Canada and Saudi Arabia, with each giving around $4 billion. Harvard University has received the most foreign funding at about $4 billion from various countries, followed by Cornell.

Gordon Gee has served as president of more American universities than almost anyone, as far as he knows. Most recently he led West Virginia University, from which he retired in July; before that, he oversaw Ohio State, Vanderbilt, Brown and the University of Colorado over a span of 45 years. 

Alongside his various presidencies, Gee also helped open Hillel houses on two different campuses: Vanderbilt and Ohio State. It’s a distinction that makes him particularly well-suited to opine on the state of American higher education, which has been grappling with the thorny and sometimes intertwined issues of antisemitism, free speech and student conduct. 

A 2002 Wall Street Journal article attributed Vanderbilt’s decision to increase recruitment of Jewish students to Gee, himself a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. More than two decades later, under a successor Gee proudly claims, Vanderbilt is still courting Jewish students and positioning itself as a bastion of common sense amid the upheaval that followed the Oct. 7 attacks two years ago.   

As Gee, 81, looks back on his career and reflects on the state of academia, he sees a growing chasm between what he described as two different kinds of universities: those like Vanderbilt, that have held firm to the principles of institutional neutrality, and those like his alma mater, Columbia University, that have struggled to take an impartial stance in response to campus protests and antisemitism — and that are wary of making significant change. 

“One is the resistance. [They say] anything that comes out of the [Trump] administration, anything that they want, anything, it is just terrible,” Gee told Jewish Insider in an interview last week ahead of a keynote address at the annual conference of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa. “The other are those institutions that are trying to determine a way to move forward and do so by knitting themselves together in different ways. Those are mainly the big public universities. Those are the real future of the American higher education system, and for Jewish students themselves.”

Immediately after Oct. 7, Gee called Rabbi Ari Berman, the president of Yeshiva University, and asked for help in recruiting other university presidents to sign onto a statement condemning the attacks, which was published in The Wall Street Journal as a full-page ad. But they were unable to get many of the big-name academic leaders they wanted. 

“The biggest challenge facing university presidents is fear,” said Gee. “I think the university presidents, in many ways, are paralyzed, and a lot of it is brought on by themselves, because of the fact that they allowed themselves to become kind of engaged in this ‘go along, get along’ response, and now all of a sudden, when they discover that they’ve got to take a stand, it’s becoming very difficult for many of them.”

“That was when I really started to discover that there’s no moral high ground on this with a number of people. It was very distressing to me,” Gee said. “I think that so many people were walking on eggshells. They didn’t want to have disruptions. They also didn’t want to speak out.”

Although anti-Israel protests took place at West Virginia University, there was no encampment there in the spring of 2024, as happened on dozens of campuses around the country that semester. As Gee watched other university administrators fail to respond in clear ways to the protests that often crossed a line into harassment and targeting of Jewish students, he saw administrators afraid of upsetting stakeholders on campus. 

“The biggest challenge facing university presidents is fear,” said Gee. “I think the university presidents, in many ways, are paralyzed, and a lot of it is brought on by themselves, because of the fact that they allowed themselves to become kind of engaged in this ‘go along, get along’ response, and now all of a sudden, when they discover that they’ve got to take a stand, it’s becoming very difficult for many of them.”

Rather than protecting the free speech of pro-Israel students who were often cowed into silence by classmates, university leaders did little, Gee alleged. 

“They were silencing those who were intimidated by it, those who were pro-Israel, those who wanted to speak up in terms of balance,” said Gee. “University administrators were allowing that to happen.”

As President Donald Trump has sought to make his mark on higher education by targeting campus antisemitism and going after university diversity programs, Gee does not share the same skepticism toward Trump’s proposals that has characterized the responses of many university administrators who worry the administration’s actions are too heavy-handed.

In recent weeks, the Trump administration has approached several top universities about signing onto a compact that would give them preferential access to federal funds. No university has yet signed on, with administrators claiming it amounts to government infringement on their academic freedom. Gee — generally a skeptic of federal meddling in higher education — isn’t entirely opposed.

“If the Obama administration were doing exactly the same thing, people would cheerfully say, ‘Oh, that’s right, and that’s what we’re going to do,’” said Gee. “A lot of it has to do with the people in power, and I can understand that to some extent, but it doesn’t mean to say that the ideas are bad.” 

“Three-quarters of it is exactly what universities ought to be doing. A quarter of it probably is a bridge too far,” Gee explained. “But the very fact that a political administration, this Republican administration, can take on universities, and successfully so in many ways, has shown how the relationship between universities and the general public has deteriorated.” 

While Trump’s approach may have come from a genuine concern about the academic environment, “they’ve used that not as a scalpel, but as a sledgehammer,” said Gee. Still, he thinks the vehement opposition in many corners of academia has to do with the messenger.

“If the Obama administration were doing exactly the same thing, people would cheerfully say, ‘Oh, that’s right, and that’s what we’re going to do,’” said Gee. “A lot of it has to do with the people in power, and I can understand that to some extent, but it doesn’t mean to say that the ideas are bad.” 

Gee described himself as “always the optimist,” and said the current uncertainty facing academia — budget cuts, public distrust, a lack of understanding of its purpose — can be a “clarifying moment.”

“We need to understand we’re about teaching and learning. We’re not about propaganda. We’re not about ostracism. We’re not about making people feel inadequate if they don’t toe the line,” said Gee.